


how far the stars seem (and how far is our first kiss)

by C_AND_B



Category: Amar a Muerte (TV)
Genre: 4+1 (except it's actually 4+2), Canon Compliant, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-31 06:04:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17843837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/C_AND_B/pseuds/C_AND_B
Summary: four times Valentina almost kisses Juliana and two times she actually does.





	how far the stars seem (and how far is our first kiss)

**Author's Note:**

> got the idea from an anon prompt - i shouldn't have done this but i have and i don't know about it but it exists so do with it what you will
> 
> might continue it at some point but i'm making exactly zero promises about that

Juliana is... intriguing. She has a sincerity that Valentina doesn’t know too well - a seriousness that undercuts the jokes she makes and the smiles she shines. But that didn’t make her jokes any less funny, or her smiles any less dazzling, or stop Val from wanting to know more. To know everything. She always liked that part of making new friends, discovering all the little things about them that you would probably never know if you simply judged from the surface.

Like that Juliana was compassionate, and creative, and one of the only people who seemed to make her smile these days. That she had a grasp on the world that Val had never developed herself in her (until recently) sheltered existence and that, in spite of all of her talents, she couldn’t swim.

_“Do you trust me?”_ Valentina asks at a point where Juliana has already shown that she does, laid down her feelings just as surely as she’d laid her body on the surface of the water, and it’s in the response - in the slight nod of her head, in the peaceful picture on her face, eyes closed and serene – that Val has a thought she never dreamed of having.

She could kiss her.

It’s not a fully formed thought, it lingers in the back of her head, just out of reach, but it’s there nonetheless. The thought that it would be so easy to gently lift Juliana’s head from the water, so easy to lean in and guide their lips together. It wouldn’t take much at all (except far more courage than she realistically has).

It startles her, the thought. The picture of it in her head. The idea that she would ever want to do that. She’d never wanted to do that with a girl before. But this was Juliana. Juliana who had been there for her more than most the past few days, who made her laugh, who was so different than everyone else around her and that’s all it was.

It was novel, and Juliana was kind, and she was just attaching this feeling of happiness to whoever was closest. It would fade before she knew it.

It fades the second Lucho appears and she forces herself to lose track of the thought in him because he was her boyfriend, because she liked having a boyfriend, because she liked boys.

It’s nothing but timing. It’s nothing but the setting. It’s nothing but transference. And if the thought sparks at the back of her head again later when she’s dropping her necklace around Juliana’s neck and marvelling in the warmth of her hug, well that’s nothing either, just residual confusion. 

* * *

 

The feeling intensifies - the interest that is. She can’t stop scrambling to see Juliana and learn things about her and she can’t explain the way she’s itching to find out more, find out everything. She puts it down to wondering where she came from, and how their lives differ and how in some ways, in their loss, they’re exactly the same. She’s just not used to having someone understand.

That’s why she keeps hunting, keeps diving, keeps pushing where she maybe shouldn’t and forgetting that not everyone likes to be as open as her. That not everyone is happy to cry in parks and spill secrets to girls they haven’t really known that long. That not everyone likes to divulge intimate facts about their sex lives. That maybe Juliana is one of those people.

But she can’t stop. She knows she shouldn’t push, or stare, or laugh but she can’t stop herself from doing any of those things because the need to know about Juliana is far stronger than her awareness that she should probably stop the words coming out her mouth. Except Juliana starts blushing and looking nervous and attempting to hide behind her hair and she just looks so pretty.

So pretty, and so interesting, and so bashful in the way that she admits she’s never slept with anyone before and it makes no sense to Valentina. She can’t understand how people haven’t been lining up down the streets just to kiss Juliana (she pushes back the thought that she might have even taken her own place in that queue).

“You’re not missing anything,” she admits, if only so Juliana will look at her again and maybe because she believes it to be true. Sex was... fine. On a good day she might even call it nice but it had never been all it was cracked up to be for her. She expected fireworks, and passion, and some intense burning to do it again and again but she’d never found those things. It just was what it was.

“Haven’t you ever been in love?” Juliana asks so earnestly and it strikes Valentina that that’s her question, that Juliana can’t think about sex without thinking about love, that maybe that’s been Valentina’s problem all along, the very reason she’s never managed to spark a fire in her soul - she doesn’t love Lucho and, no matter how fondly she thinks of Canada, she was never in love then either.

And maybe she doesn’t believe in it at all.

Or maybe she could.

Maybe, as she loses herself in the serious look on Juliana’s face, the way her eyes search and search and search for their answers in Val’s own, maybe she could believe in love. Or maybe the way her heart races and her eyes dip to soft lips is all down to something else entirely. Something else she didn’t ever believe she could feel for a girl.

Or maybe she was just being ridiculous.

She decides upon the latter. Pushes herself to make some comment about how love is all a capitalist scam to sell heart-shaped gifts on Valentine’s Day and finds herself a little bit thankful when everything subsequently dissolves into chaos and she doesn’t have time to dwell on anything or do something stupid by acting on stupid thoughts cropping up at stupid times.

* * *

 

Juliana doesn’t dance like nobody is watching. She dances she doesn’t care. She dances like she’s lost in the music. She dances like she knows Valentina is staring at her, like she knows she’s moving in slow motion in Val’s head, like she knows she can’t even begin to comprehend the vision in front of her. And Valentina can’t stop looking – the magnetising sway of her hips, the patterns she traces in the air with free hands, the pure smile on her face.

(She can’t stop looking.

She doesn’t want to).

She thinks that she could watch Juliana dance forever, that it’s arguably the freest she’s ever seen her, uninhibited by the knowledge that people are watching, simply enjoying the way her hips just know how to move in tempo with the music. She thinks that this is her new favourite song. That all it will make her think about is this moment and maybe she’s not completely sure why that makes her chest feel so tight just yet but it’s right at the edge of her brain, begging to be known.

She does know for sure, however, that whatever it is, it’s making her reckless. It’s making her impulsive and bold and making her do stuff like convince Juliana that she should teach her how to dance, and maybe that should’ve been an absolutely fine thing to ask a friend. Maybe most friends wouldn’t think anything of being pressed so tightly together. Maybe if they were two different people it all could’ve been normal.

It almost is.

_“When you dance like this you have to look in my eyes.”_

Just like that it isn’t.

Valentina tries to find some reason to not, tells herself that she has to look at her feet or she’ll step on Juliana’s toes, tells herself that it’s a bad idea and it is. It’s definitely a bad idea. But she looks up anyway when she catches sight of Juliana’s soft, patient smile, and the gleam in her eye that begs to be examined and she knows it’s futile to fight against the pull of her gaze.

She feels herself move incrementally closer. Feels the way Juliana guides her just another inch further into her body without a hint of suggestion of anything out of the ordinary on her face. Feels the soft hand shifting up her back and the weight of her own hand on Juliana’s hip that suddenly feels so much heavier - not physically, nothing about her changes drastically, but the touch just feels so _weighted_ in a way Valentina can’t put into words.

Except maybe she can because, standing there, dancing to the faint music she can still hear from the class, and losing herself in a moment she never thought she’d crave to live in forever, something occurs to her and, just like that, everything makes sense.

The way Juliana always made her smile, how she seemed to be one of two people who could pull a genuine smile from whatever kind of mood Valentina found herself in. The way she found herself counting seconds since the last time she saw her, until the next time she could see her again.

How, that day on the park bench, everything suddenly felt so muted, so unimportant, so _fine_ when Juliana pulled her in for that half hug. Why she almost didn’t want to let go the first time they shook hands and, why she hadn’t ever spared a thought for the name Juliana before, but found it running through her brain on repeat for days after.

Why she felt like she never wanted to leave her side from the second she was by it.

Valentina vaguely thinks that if she knew then what she knew now maybe she would’ve kissed Juliana the second she got burger sauce on her face. But what ifs and could’ve beens were unimportant. What was important was the here and now. The here and now when she knows. _She knows_. And she wants. _Dios how she wants_.

But she shouldn’t, and she can’t have it, and so instead she just dances and dances until Juliana says she needs to go home and she herself spends way too long listening to the same song on repeat and reliving the feeling of being in her arms, of feeling so sure of something for once in her life.

But being sure never lasts. She’d been sure before and watched things change right in front of her eyes. She gets defensive when Lucho asks about it, when he says she’s obsessed with spending time with Juliana and she knows that he’s right but he shouldn’t be, because she can’t be feeling this.

_She can’t be feeling this_.

They were just friends.

She’d never had a friend like Juliana before and it was confusing.

She was at rock bottom in her life and it was confusing.

She was confused.

_They were just friends_.

* * *

 

No matter how hard Valentina tells herself they’re friends, she finds herself thinking about it again. Kissing Juliana. In fact, she thinks about it a lot. She eats breakfast and she thinks about it. She goes to class and she thinks about it. She hears _that_ song and she really thinks about it.

She tells herself it’s stupid.

The thought still crops back up. 

The next time she thinks about it, _really thinks_ about it, like as an honest action and not just the abstract thought of how soft Juliana’s lips would be, is more like a series of thoughts. A series of _I-could kiss-her-right-nows._

The first time she sees Juliana in that black dress, _that_ black dress, she feels a little like her brain is on the fritz, like there’s a high chance it might actually be melting out of her ears and all she can hear is the stupid _wow_ that slips from her mouth and the way she can’t stop telling Juliana that she looks very pretty. She prays that she doesn’t sound too breathless, too affected, but she’s definitely both of those things because Juliana looks more than pretty.

Juliana looks like the first drop of water a lost man sees in the desert. The first peek of blue in an otherwise grey sky. The first sprig of grass poking through a snowy landscape. She’s a thousand clichés wrapped into one body and so nervous. Valentina can’t remember the last time she saw someone so ethereal seem bashful about it all, can’t understand that Juliana doesn’t seem to know she’s the prettiest thing Val has ever seen.

The prettiest thing she’s ever seen, that she spends all day preparing herself to see again, and somehow still finds that it isn’t enough. She almost convinces herself that it’ll be fine and then Juliana puts one foot out of the car and just like that she’s reminded she absolutely cannot handle it.

She almost trips don’t the stairs.

She almost tells Juliana she’s the single most beautiful thing she’s ever seen in her life.

She almost does a lot of stupid things.

Instead she settles for telling her that she’s pretty again, attempts to brush it off as an ordinary compliment even if she knows it goes far beyond that. Settles for folding herself into Juliana’s arms, even if she has to pull out of the hug in the next second before she gets stuck in the feeling, even if she has to physically work to clear her head of thoughts she shouldn’t be having about her friend.

She clears her throat, shakes her head, looks at anything and everything that isn’t directly Juliana and shifts the conversation to something safer. Safer was good. Safer wasn’t thinking about the gentle slope of Juliana’s neck suddenly so fully on display, or the wisps of hair she just wanted to push back from her face, push back and graze the soft shell of her ear in the process. Safer wasn’t thinking about what flavour her lip-balm was or how her mouth would feel pressed against Valentina’s own. Safer was safe.

And yet, it doesn’t help much. It doesn’t really help at all. It turns out that nothing is really safe when she’s around Juliana anymore. She thinks that drugs might help. She thinks that maybe they’ll help her to stop over-thinking, overanalysing everything about Juliana and Juliana with her and Juliana with Sergio and _Juliana, Juliana, Juliana_.

They don’t help.

They make it so much worse.

They make her loose, and light, and more than a little fuzzy and Juliana is so _there_ , so completely focused on her - on making sure that she’s safe, on making sure that she’s having fun, on simply making sure that Valentina stays firmly planted on her own two feet.

And Valentina can’t stop touching her. Her hands. Her arms. Her face. Her waist. She never pulls away, never drifts. Just laughs and lets herself be held and Valentina can’t help but feel a little special to be able to get so close, can’t help but feel a little intoxicated when Juliana touches her of her own accord (even if the arm she slips around her waist is purely to hold her up).

She wants to kiss her when everyone is around and laughing and having fun. She wants to kiss her even more when it’s just the two of them in her room. She thinks it’s because it seems so much more real when it’s just the two of them, when there’s nothing to distract her from the way she’s feeling, when there’s no one to wonder why Valentina can’t stop looking at her like that.

She wants to kiss her when she pulls her in to dance, when she drapes Juliana’s arm around her neck and thinks that all it would take is one press forward, just barely an inch, and they’d be kissing. One daring stretch of her neck and she could answer all the questions swirling around her mind. But, even intoxicated, Valentina doesn’t feel brave and daring and she can’t push past the boundary that’s telling her not to do something stupid when she’s staring into chocolate eyes.

So she makes her close them.

She makes them play a game because that seems like a great idea. Except maybe it’s the worst idea she’s ever had because now Juliana’s eyes are closed and it hasn’t made it any easier. If anything it’s made it all worse. All Val can think about is how pretty she looks, how open her face is, how soft the skin of her arms is, and her shoulders, and her neck, and her face.

All Val can think about is how much trust Juliana places in her, how she never threatens to open her eyes, how she doesn’t pull away from the touch by a single inch, simply lets Val run her fingers across her body, almost _leaning_ into the warmth that it provides.

And Val is almost sure that this is the time she’ll do it. That this is the time she’ll finally build up the courage to do it. But the universe has other things in store, and maybe that’s a good thing because Val thinks she wants to kiss Juliana when there are no excuses for her actions. She doesn’t want either of them to be able to blame being drunk, or high, or confused. She wants to feel something real. She wants Juliana to know that it’s something real. They both deserve that.

She thinks that it would be real the next morning when they’re lying next to each other in bed, so close they’re almost sharing a pillow, so close that she thinks she could count every single one of Juliana’s eyelashes and that she would happily spend the day doing so.

She thinks that what she’s feeling is very real.

And, in the stone cold sober light of day, she’s far too scared to do anything about it.

* * *

 

She doesn’t know how to fix it and she knows that’s because she can’t. Juliana’s mother was kidnapped and there’s nothing she can do to fix it, no matter how much she wishes there was. That doesn’t stop her from trying to make it slightly better, from trying to make it seem slightly less world-ending, slightly less unfixable.

_“You are not alone. You’ve got me.”_

She means the words, in whatever capacity she was allowed to mean them, she meant them. Juliana could have her any way she wanted. All she asked in return was a smile; she just wanted to see her smile. Really smile. Not a fake one, or an act, but a real smile that she couldn’t help. Just a glimpse of happiness even if everything else was a dark cloud. One smile could do wonders; Valentina knew that from personal experience.

She talks Juliana into the pool in the hopes of distracting her, of making her laugh, of helping her relax, even if it was only for ten minutes. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’d never had to fix a problem like this before, had never wanted to help someone so badly, had never wished she could take someone’s pain away with the click of her fingers so much. She’d never cared about anyone like this before, she’d never _felt_ like this before.

The distraction works for a while - Juliana seems calmer floating in the water, seems a little lighter as she giggles and begs Valentina not to let her go, smiles so beautifully when she realises she’s actually floating without Valentina’s arms beneath her as they simply lie side by side instead.

Then Valentina finds herself distracted by something else entirely, caught up in the weightless feeling holding her, and the gentle but strong grip of Juliana’s hand in hers. She thinks about the fact that this is the first place she ever wanted to kiss Juliana, before it really made any sense to her. She thinks about how nice it felt to be trusted by someone completely, how nice it is to know that Juliana still feels that way about her now, that she’s the one she turned to in her hour of need.

She thinks about how she just wants to hold her, to shield her, to protect her. How she wants to be held _by_ her. How she wants to build a home out of her laugh and live in it for the rest of her life. How, at the end of the day, what she really, truly wants to do is kiss her. Paint herself on Juliana’s lips. Let loose a kaleidoscope of butterflies in her stomach. Connect them in a way she’s been thinking about for far longer than she should have been.

And so when they’re laughing, and smiling, and drifting closer than friends drift, she simply tilts her head just so, lets her forehead fall forward and she knows it’s a terrible time. She arguably couldn’t have worse timing. She probably shouldn’t do it. Honestly she tries to talk herself out of it, shifting back with a nervous laugh and an almost escape but Juliana has that one incredibly serious look on her face and Val thinks she’s been wanting to kiss it away for a very long time.

She thinks that maybe there is no right or wrong time, that maybe there’s just time. There’s just time and the want to kiss Juliana or the lack of it, and she doesn’t think there’s been a single second in a long time where she wasn’t wanting with every fibre of her being.

She thinks that maybe Juliana is waiting for her to, that maybe she’s been waiting for a long time too, that maybe she’s known every time it’s crossed Valentina’s mind. And Valentina might be terrified, and still hugely confused about what it means, but she thinks maybe it’s time to stop stalling.

She’s shaky, and half pushing forward and half pulling back when she finally convinces their lips to meet but then she can’t stop. She roots herself to Juliana’s hands in her own; the way they squeeze and relax like she’s trying to remind herself that this is real, that it’s _her_ Valentina is kissing. Valentina, on her part, keeps her lips dancing in perfect tandem with Juliana’s, her eyes screwed shut like she’s a little afraid this might all disappear if she opens them.

And Valentina doesn’t think she’s ever kissed someone so slowly before. So cautiously. She’s never been so scared that a moment might break, that she might be the one to break it. She doesn’t think she’s ever wanted to something so much and been afraid of it at the same time but she never wants to stop kissing Juliana, wants to live in the warm feeling forever, in the haze of her mouth and the sudden thought in her head that it makes sense. _They make sense_.

She doesn’t want to brave the cold that might come after, doesn’t want to sit alone in a world where she knows what it’s like to kiss Juliana and can’t do it again. So she keeps kissing her, afraid that when she stops she won’t be able to exist in the same way ever again.

She’s right about that. Kissing Juliana unlocks a whole new world. A world in which it’s like suddenly everything was in colour, like she’s been waltzing around in black and white for years and just now she was beginning to fall in love with the blue of the pool, the white of Juliana’s bathing suit, the brown of her eyes and the crimson blush that splashes itself across her cheeks.

Kissing Juliana makes everything make complete sense and absolutely no sense at all in the very same second. It’s everything she was told a first kiss should be and she’s terrified of what it all means when Juliana disappears right in front of her eyes, terrified that she might have lost her, terrified that maybe this was the first and only kiss they’d ever share.

But she meant it when she said Juliana could have her in any capacity she wanted.

Just so long as she wanted her in some capacity.

* * *

 

She thinks about it all the time. _All the time_. She thinks about what it was like to kiss Juliana, and how she wants to do it again, and what it all means - she really needs to know what it all means.

And she knows that she shouldn’t. She knows that Juliana’s mother is in the hospital and there’s the ever-looming threat of danger hanging over their heads and that she shouldn’t be adding any more confusion to the mix. That Juliana needs to keep her head clear.

But Valentina’s mind has never been so unclear in her life - except that maybe that’s not quite true, her head is clear in the sense that it’s evidently devoid of anything that isn’t Juliana, about kissing Juliana, about the unsteady way of her heart around Juliana, about finally telling Juliana that it wasn’t a mistake to her, that she didn’t want to sweep it under the rug.

She doesn’t want to leave Juliana’s side, she thinks about being next to her every second that she’s not, and just because it’s apparently her new thing to always pick the wrong time to do things, she decides that, in a time where Juliana is the most vulnerable she’s ever seen her, she should be vulnerable too (everything always seemed so much less scary when they were together).

_“I like you. I like you a lot.”_

It’s not the right time, it’s such a terrible time but she needed to say the words and she needed it to be out there even if all it did was linger between them, and she’s glad she says it, glad she gets to see the light in Juliana’s eyes at the confession, even if she’s met with a _not now_ because that’s not a no and the way Juliana falls into her arms is just the way Valentina falls into her and she knows that she’s not alone in this.

Bad timing didn’t mean her time would never come.

So she waits, and she stews in the constant feeling of wanting to kiss Juliana, and hold her hand, and hug her and tell her that she likes her and just have her say it back like it was simple, like their lives weren’t so messy at the moment, like there wasn’t even a chance this would make them messier.

It gets messier anyway. Danger stumbles its way back to their doorstep and even when Valentina thinks maybe everything will be fine again, maybe they’ll finally get back to the quiet bubble of solace the two of them had carved out in their messy world, it gets worse and she’s hit with the notion that she might lose Juliana altogether.

It’s that sheer panic, _that fear_ , that fuels her desperation the next time she kisses Juliana. They’re sitting in her car and she knows that all she really wants is for Juliana to be safe, but she’d always hoped that she’d get to enjoy that safety with her. She’d always thought somehow they’d make it out the other end of all this alright. But she wants to enjoy the alright they’re being offered right now before it all disappears again.

She wants to say what she needs to say without words because she can’t quite figure out how to say it, because all she really knows is that she’s brimming from head to toe with a need to keep Juliana close for as long as she’s allowed, to really, tangibly feel her presence next to her, _on her_.

In the end, Juliana kisses her more than she kisses Juliana. She feels the soft caress of Juliana’s thumb behind her ear, grounding her to the moment, as they push forward and Valentina finally lets the weight of not knowing if she’d ever get to do this again drop from her shoulders.

It starts softly at first, like their kiss in the pool. There’s a second after the first press of lips where Valentina is afraid that’s all it will be, where Valentina chases the mouth she’s been thinking about for weeks and is gifted with them all over again, and everything just feels so right.

It becomes heated then. Fast kisses. Pressing kisses. Imploring kisses. The kind of kiss that makes it hard to stay still, the kind of kiss that makes her body shift with the intensity of each new one and she needs more. More of Juliana’s mouth, and more of her skin, and she doesn’t know what her end goal is when she pulls off her jacket but she knows that she needs more, that, if this is all she’ll be given, she needs it to be more.

Her hand runs down the soft skin of Juliana’s arm with, simultaneously, no real intention and every single drop of intention she’s ever had, and she wants to grab, wants to dig her fingers into her skin and merge herself with Juliana’s body so they can never be separated again, wants to tattoo her touch on every inch of her so that she never forgets in the same way Valentina will never be able to forget.

They get interrupted again before they can figure out where their leading kisses will end and Valentina can’t even find it in herself to care because this kiss felt like a promise, like a prelude to something heart-stopping. And, laughing with Juliana in the back of a too hot car, stewing in what they created, she knows that this is what she wants, that there wasn’t a single thing in her life she’s ever wanted more, that she would fight for this until she couldn’t fight anymore and then some.

And she would convince Juliana of that.

No matter how long it took.

Except Juliana takes hold of her hand and she instantly basks in the knowledge that she won’t need to, that she already knows every thought running through Valentina’s mind and she’s come to the same conclusion.

That she’d be fighting for it right by her side.

That they could overcome anything together.

(Valentina counts the seconds until she can kiss her again).


End file.
